Climate fiction is hotter than ever in the aftermath of real-life disasters Super Typhoon Haiyan and Superstorm Sandy

It’s not sci-fi, it’s “cli fi.” Also known as climate fiction, it’s an emerging genre that film directors have been exploring recently. Now the genre is about to get red hot, post-Super Typhoon Haiyan (or “sea sparrow” when translated to English).

Hollywood crews often go to Iceland to film climate disaster movies on location, for TV specials or what later turns out to be blockbuster feature movies. Expect more location shoots there in future years, as the world heats up in tiny increments and the polar ice caps melt summer after summer. Drip, drip, drip.

But this emerging genre of “cli fi” movies, from “Day After Tomorrow” to “The Road,” is about to get some Old World company early in 2014 when director Darren Aronofsky’s “Noah” is released in March.

Yes, that Noah, and yes, that flood. Post Super Typhoon Haiyan, and Superstorm Sandy, hold on to your theater seats. “Noah” is not set in the usual “cli-fi” dystopia in the near or distant future; this movie is set some 5,000 years ago in the dreadful, tragic, Biblical past.

Maybe that Biblical flood was a hoax perpetrated by some Hebrew scribes, in much the way the global warming is said to be a hoax perpetrated by good old Al Gore as part of his climate shenanigans to get rich(er) off polar fraud? Kidding.

Sadly, some misguided Christian fundamentalists and Orthodox Jewish fundamentalists are already protesting Aronofsky’s movie, complaining it does not follow God’s words as written down in the Holy Bible by pre-Internet scribes speaking Aramaic or Greek.

As usual, the religious nuts come out of the woodwork for films like this, and in a land of freedom of speech, let them complain. They only give their Good Book a black eye. Noah never even existed, for crying out Zeus!

Aronofsky, educated at the same Harvard where Gore invented the Internet, has put a lot of time and effort in his “Noah” project, as any quick take of his Twitter feed will attest.

He cares about this film, and he has put his cast and crew through the ancient flood “event” in order to do two things: entertain audiences with a vivid, detailed visit to a terrible tale from the Bible, and set up a global ”wake up call” about what humans are doing to the Earth today.

Think a “flood” like Noah’s can’t happen again? Think again. And America’s long coastlines will bear the brunt of it, too, if and when it happens. Start praying, if you’re religious. And start moving to higher ground, if you care about the future.

While “cli fi” has been defined by NPR and the Christian Science Monitor as taking place only in the present or near future — in novels such as Barbara Kingsolver’s “Flight Behavior” and Nathaniel Rich’s Superstorm Sandy novel “Odds Against Tomorrow” — in fact, ”cli fi” can take place in the distant past, too. Even in Noah’s time. Even during the Flood, the flood to end all floods.

While the marketing for “Noah” has not begun, Aronofsky’s eccentric idea to film a global warming ”warning call” based on an imaginary “event” some 5,000 years ago in the Biblical past has legs. Long legs. And we’re going to be in it for the long haul, too.

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Dan Bloom is a freelance writer based in Asia since 1991. During a five-year stint in Tokyo, he covered the triumphs (and occasional failures) of Hollywood movies in Japan and interviewed American actors passing through Tokyo on film promotion tours, including Billy Crystal, Robin Williams and Kevin Costner.